I start by looking for images of parking lots. I’m thinking
about finding the perfect image, or making one. I have to see an image of a
parking lot with over-layed text that reads “Social Network.”

Then I move on to looking at images under the term crash.
There are cartoon characters, crash dummies, airplanes in pieces, bodies,
stills from the movie, cymbals, explosions. I open a new tab: Wikipedia –
Crash. I’m redirected to collision.

A collision is an isolated event in which two or more moving
bodies exert relatively strong forces on each other for a relatively short
time. ¶ Collisions can be elastic, meaning they conserve energy and momentum,
inelastic, meaning they conserve momentum but not energy, or totally inelastic
(or plastic), meaning they conserve momentum and the two objects stick
together.

It’s this last type of collision that interests me most, the
totally inelastic one—when the two colliding objects merge into one and
conserve momentum.

While cruising through the images I’m collecting, I think of
Jean Baudrillard and then J.G. Ballard, retracing steps that I took three years
ago, all in perfect recall. I make a new folder called parking-lots and drop in
images with filenames like 5781586-aerial-view-of-an-empty-parking-lot,
grantham-parking-lot-0951, Lot, Tel_Aviv_parking_lot, and zoo_lot2-750149.

It’s getting dark outside and my terminal is bathing this
corner of the room and the front side of my knuckles in bluish light. My
fingernails dimly reflect the screen. All the tiny parallel ridges reflect
light in opposing directions, causing the reflection to appear matte.

I get up from my desk, look out the window, decide not to
close the drapes, turn around and glance at the cat, then sit back down. My
fingernails are long and hit the keys before the pads of my fingers. I ...

Editor’s Note: “"Tricia u MUST join Twitter to network with Poets" *tricia joins twitter, falls in with a million Comedy Fuckers, forgets what poem even is*” — @TriciaLockwood, September 2, 2011

Patricia Lockwood is an actual poet—published in the New Yorker, even!—who has inappropriately touched the imaginations of a thousand followers with her “sexts.” Born around the time of the Anthony Weiner scandal, the genre congeals gobs of glowing poetry from networked life’s greasy stew of blunt spam copy, collaged pop culture, and constant little spells of titillation. This is a selection of Lockwood’s hottest sexts.

A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud

Do you smell like a mousetrap? I am a cruel woman and I simply adore the smell of mousetraps

A Teenage Turtle takes extreme pleasure from sticking his head in and out of his shell very slowly while a rat watches

Midnight. My wife and children are asleep. Breathlessly I begin to search for my favorite kind of porn: "Women Standing in Big Jeans"

THE BIGGEST WOMEN IN THE TIGHTEST JEANS!!! U WONT BELIEVE YOUR EYES! THESE WOMEN SIMPLY CANT GET ENOUGH STANDING AROUND IN BIG JEANS!

These jeansluts stand up really straight with their tits out, holding the jeans as far away from their bodies as possible! SO RAW

This girl wants a denim vest, a denim scrunchie, and denim Keds -- are YOU the sicko who's going to give them to her

You are miniature, and I put you in the bell of a saxophone and play a long soulful B-flat

I am Everest and I JO while a 100-year-old grampa tries to climb me. At the moment he reaches my peak I produce a thunderous rockslide...

I keep hearing artists say they are writing. What can they do with what they have written? Leave it in the notebook, like a sketch—a trace of a private activity done in the studio. Get it printed in a literary zine and become a hybrid artist/writer. Attach it to the brochure of a gallery exhibition and let it function, like a press release, for the show’s promotional apparatus—an ephemeral accessory to a saleable thing. Make an artist’s book. By joining work with words and work with materials in a tangible object, the artist’s book leads an audience to see the two as equal members in an artist’s output. But what else is there?

The question looks familiar from Rhizome’s perspective. It doubles the one facing artists who work online. With internet art, as with writing, choices about display are wrapped in choices about distribution. At one point or another, many artists wonder whether what they do online is an end in itself or a public sketchbook, a way to work through ideas that will later be embodied in a work to be shown in a gallery. Furthermore, it’s harder to make work online than on a canvas without touching problems of language. The internet may be a medium of visual culture, but the keyword is what finds the image, the tag brings you back to it, chat spreads it. There is plenty of popular-science speculation on how these new everyday forms of language use are “changing our minds.” Until ways are found to measure these changes, art and poetry can tell us more about them than prose.

Today marks the beginning of a project to regularly feature artists’ texts, poetry, and experimental writing on Rhizome’s blog. Posts in the series ...

A headless statue of winged Nike, black pixels swarming above her stumped neck. A collage of ancient, sand-colored busts and patterns drawn with a Sharpie. A Michelangelo’s Pieta coated in blue-streaked purple sludge. These are some of images you will find on Sterling Crispin’s Tumblr, “Greek New Media Shit.” As I write this, the most recent post is a looped animation by Jennifer Chan. Two Hellenistic statues remain static in the foreground as a violet blob belches out a browser frame. Flat green letters brand it “recipe art.” Chan, apparently, thinks mixing classical references with internet imagery is formulaic. The opinion is somewhat sympathetic to Crispin, who told me in an email that his blog “started as a criticism of a cliché that I identified and has started self-perpetuating.” But Crispin added that since he started the Tumblr he has become more curious about the reasons behind the formula’s appeal. No recipe passes through so many hands without being good.

To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been used in the past as a touchstone for artists who measure their own vision against an anthropocentric one. “Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty,” Apollinaire wrote in an essay about a 1912 exhibition of Cubist painting. “It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe this new measure of perfection […].” The modernists never determined what the “fourth dimension” was, besides a plane of activity beyond human perception. Today the internet—and the spatial and perceptual relations it has engendered—make a familiar substitute for it. “Greek new media shit” puts representations of the visible and the invisible in the same frame.